Electronic Music Festival // Portland, Oregon

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Bryan Zentz

Bryan Zentz boasts two decades of experience with producing and djing electronic music, an impressive catalog of releases on some of the world’s biggest techno and house labels, and he has toured the world as a dj, performing side-by-side with internationally renowned artists such as Carl Cox.

Today, as a Portland resident, Zentz continues pushing the boundaries of style and sound, providing PDX with an unparalleled skill set and a unique influence which have unquestionably contributed to the rebirth and current strength of the local techno scene.

Bryan Zentz has released on countless highly regarded labels. The list includes Definitive, Bush, Tronic, Primate, Intec, Soma, Rotation, Jericho and Bitten, as well as Portland labels SubSensory, Lowdubs and Slant, Seattle’s From 0-1, and notably, Ritchie Hawtin’s world renowned Plus 8. His appearance on Hawtin’s label came a full 15 years after the pairs’ first collaboration. In a sense, it brings his career full circle, it was Hawtin who originally gave Bryan the motivation and belief to keep going while he was still looking for his first deal and indeed, it all came good in 1994 with a debut release on the legendary Definitive label. Recording as Barada, classics such as Mathematics and Glue backed up by the full length album Strategies for a Deeper Design, while other early releases on labels like EXperimental, Bush and Clashbackk really caught the imagination of the global techno community resulting in remixes for Woody McBride, Christian Smith, Ken Ishii and Tim Xavier (to name a few) and a dj schedule that’s taken him across the USA, France, Belgium, Australia and Japan.

In 2004, Bryan went a step further setting up his own Disruptor label as a way of fusing his love of techno and dub. More than anything it allowed him to fulfill his musical vision while offering the chance to oversee the entire production process from label artwork and packaging all the way through to promotion and release. A string of critically acclaimed releases on Disruptor have since been complimented by outings as Stare 5 (CYMK) and again as Barada (Morris Audio) introducing his unmistakable sound to a whole new audience and with the Midnight Teeth EP hitting such a rich vein of form, his current renaissance shows no signs of slowing.

It’s clearly been a far-reaching musical journey that’s led Bryan to his present position, one that explains his mastery of so many styles – from techno, house, and electro to ambient, dub and industrial. Through it all, Bryan Zentz has evolved into an architect of highly complex sound structures, skilfully blending tonal percussion, melodic rhythms and indefatigable bass lines with his trademark shuffle. While the music has changed dramatically the seed of inspiration, the controlled aggression and raw energy remain as apparent now as always.